BlackBerry's Mike Kirkup on in-app purchases, OpenGL ES, and location services

In the first part of our interview with director of developer relations Mike Kirkup, we discussed the potential of RIM's forthcoming BlackBerry Advertising Service.

In part two, we're covering in-app purchases, the adoption of hardware acceleration in the form of support for OpenGL ES 1.0, and RIM's enhanced location-based services.

Pocket Gamer: In-app purchases are a big opportunity for all mobile platforms, so how will it work on BlackBerry?

Mike Kirkup: We've announced our in-app purchasing API, which is part of a new BlackBerry Payment Service, due in mid-2010. This gives you the ability to charge for additional content or upgrades, as well as monthly or annual subscriptions, from within your game.

It will also make App World cleaner as we don't want to see multiple versions of the same game listed because it causes confusion.

We'll add carrier and credit card billing to App World, and will manage all the taxes and the other associated financial obligations. Of course, the revenue share will be different for each of those billing models. Today, with PayPal it's a 80:20 split for the developer, but I don't yet know what it will be for carrier billing.

And we will be supporting the minimum amount supported by each billing system so the micro-transactions will be as small as possible.

How are you improving BlackBerry's location services?

We're adding three new location-based APIs. One is reverse geocoding, which converts geolocation coordinates to a specific address. There's also a travel time option service, which works in the US and Canada.

More interesting perhaps for games is the cell site geolocation service, which because we own our radio stacks means we have a lot of location-based information and can be more accurate in terms of where a device is. It's also faster than GPS, uses less battery power, and can be used indoors.

The final big announcement was support for OpenGL ES. Why did you decide to do this now?

OpenGL is relevant to gaming but we didn't just add it for games. We want to make sure we can have rich graphics in all our applications.

The first device to support it is the Storm II, and we have a commitment to add OpenGL ES to our platform going forward. Currently it's OpenGL ES 1.0 but we're really close to 1.1. There are a couple of functions that would get us to ES 2.0, which would be nice, but there's a huge amount of features that can be accomplished in 1.0.

Are there any other features game developers should be aware of?

We've had the concept of peer-to-peer communications in terms of the BlackBerry Messager and PIN-to-PIN messages for a while now, and we already see it being used in games that aren't latency driven such as chess and other turn-based experiences.

We think there will be a lot more of this in future, and we'll be looking to further integrate it within applications too.

Thanks to Mike for his time.

You can find out more from the BlackBerry developers website.